You could see the installed libraries in the notebook environment using the pip freeze command. I suspect the reason for the pip install not working is because not all packages are available in the public Python Packaging Index, some are hosted on the internal BBP network on a DEVPI instance. You need to provide the --index option with the right url to PIP so it can find those packages.

For the moment there is no out-of-box solution for replicating the Collaboratory’s notebook environment. We consider eventually publicly releasing the docker image used by our JupyterHub installation, but we have not time frame for that yet.